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KATHLEEN GLASGOW
Delacorte Press
Glas_9781101934715_2p_all_r1.indd 5 4/25/16 12:35 PM
FREE SAMPLE—NOT FOR RESALE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2016 by Kathleen Glasgow
Jacket art copyright © 2016 by Jennifer Heuer
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Glasgow, Kathleen.
Title: Girl in pieces / Kathleen Glasgow.
Description: First edition. | New York : Delacorte Press, [2016] | Summary: As she
struggles to recover and survive, seventeen-year-old homeless Charlotte “Charlie” Davis
cuts herself to dull the pain of abandonment and abuse.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015044136 | ISBN 978-1-101-93471-5 (hardback) |
ISBN 978-1-101-93472-2 (el) | ISBN 978-1-101-93473-9 (glb)
Subjects: | CYAC: Emotional problems—Fiction. | Survival—Fiction. | Cutting
(Self-mutilation)—Fiction. | Abandoned children—Fiction. | Sexual abuse—Fiction. |
Homeless persons—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues /
Physical & Emotional Abuse (see also Social Issues / Sexual Abuse). | JUVENILE
FICTION / Girls & Women. | JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues /
Emotions & Feelings.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.G587 Gi 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
ISBN 978-1-524-70080-5 (intl. tr. pbk.)
The text of this book is set in 11.8- point Adobe Caslon.
Interior design by Stephanie Moss
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment
and celebrates the right to read.
Glas_9781101934715_3p_all_r1.indd 6 5/23/16 8:44 AM
3
b
Like a baby harp seal, I’m all white. My forearms are
thickly bandaged, heavy as clubs. My thighs are wrapped
tightly, too; white gauze peeks out from the shorts Nurse Ava
pulled from the lost and found box behind the nurses’ station.
Like an orphan, I came here with no clothes. Like an or-
phan, I was wrapped in a bedsheet and left on the lawn of
Regions Hospital in the freezing sleet and snow, blood seeping
through the flowered sheet.
The security guard who found me was bathed in menthol
cigarettes and the flat stink of machine coffee. There was a
curly forest of white hair inside his nostrils.
He said, “Holy Mother of God, girl, what’s been done to
you?”
My mother didn’t come to claim me.
But: I remember the stars that night. They were like salt
against the sky, like someone spilled the shaker against very
dark cloth.
That mattered to me, their accidental beauty. The last thing
I thought I might see before I died on the cold, wet grass.
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4
b
The girls here, they try to get me to talk. They want
to know What’s your story, morning glory? Tell me your tale, snail.
I hear their stories every day in Group, at lunch, in Crafts, at
breakfast, at dinner, on and on. These words that spill from
them, black memories, they can’t stop. Their stories are eating
them alive, turning them inside out. They cannot stop talking.
I cut all my words out. My heart was too full of them.
Glas_9781101934715_2p_all_r1.indd 4 4/25/16 12:35 PM
5
b
I room with Louisa. Louisa is older and her hair is like
a red- and- gold noisy ocean down her back. There’s so much of
it, she can’t even keep it in with braids or buns or scrunchies.
Her hair smells like strawberries; she smells better than any
girl I’ve ever known. I could breathe her in forever.
My first night here, when she lifted her blouse to change for
bed, in the moment before that crazy hair fell over her body
like a protective cape, I saw them, all of them, and I sucked my
breath in hard.
She said, “Don’t be scared, little one.”
I wasn’t scared. I’d just never seen a girl with skin like mine.
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6
b
Every moment is spoken for. We are up at six o’clock.
We are drinking lukewarm coffee or watered- down juice by
six forty- five. We have thirty minutes to scrape cream cheese
on cardboardy bagels, or shove pale eggs in our mouths, or
swallow lumpy oatmeal. At seven fifteen we can shower in our
rooms. There are no doors on our showers and I don’t know
what the bathroom mirrors are, but they’re not glass, and your
face looks cloudy and lost when you brush your teeth or comb
your hair. If you want to shave your legs, a nurse or an orderly
has to be present, but no one wants that, and so our legs are
like hairy- boy legs. By eight- thirty we’re in Group and that’s
when the stories spill, and the tears spill, and some girls yell
and some girls groan, but I just sit, sit, and that awful older
girl, Blue, with the bad teeth, every day, she says, Will you talk
today, Silent Sue? I’d like to hear from Silent Sue today, wouldn’t
you, Casper?
Casper tells her to knock it off. Casper tells us to breathe,
to make accordions by spreading our arms way, way out, and
then pushing in, in, in, and then pulling out, out, out, and don’t
we feel better when we just breathe? Meds come after Group,
then Quiet, then lunch, then Crafts, then Individual, which is
when you sit with your doctor and cry some more, and then
at five o’clock there’s dinner, which is more not- hot food, and
more Blue: Do you like macaroni and cheese, Silent Sue? When
you getting those bandages off, Sue? And then Entertainment.
After Entertainment, there is Phone Call, and more crying.
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7
And then it’s nine p.m. and more meds and then it’s bed. The
girls piss and hiss about the schedule, the food, Group, the
meds, everything, but I don’t care. There’s food, and a bed, and
it’s warm, and I am inside, and I am safe.
My name is not Sue.
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8
b
Jen S. is a nicker: short, twiglike scars run up and down
her arms and legs. She wears shiny athletic shorts; she’s taller
than anyone, except Doc Dooley. She dribbles an invisible
basket ball up and down the beige hallway. She shoots at an
invisible hoop. Francie is a human pincushion. She pokes her
skin with knitting needles, sticks, pins, whatever she can find.
She has angry eyes and she spits on the floor. Sasha is a fat girl
full of water: she cries in Group, she cries at meals, she cries in
her room. She’ll never be drained. She’s a plain cutter: faint red
lines crosshatch her arms. She doesn’t go deep. Isis is a burner.
Scabby, circular mounds dot her arms. There was something
in Group about rope and boy cousins and a basement but I
shut myself off for that; I turned up my inside music. Blue is a
fancy bird with her pain; she has a little bit of everything: bad
daddy, meth teeth, cigarette burns, razor slashes. Linda/Katie/
Cuddles wears grandma housedresses. Her slippers are stinky.
There are too many of her to keep track of; her scars are all on
the inside, along with her people. I don’t know why she’s with
us, but she is. She smears mashed potato on her face at dinner.
Sometimes she vomits for no reason. Even when she is com-
pletely still, you know there is a lot happening inside her body,
and that it’s not good.
I knew people like her on the outside; I stay away from her.
Glas_9781101934715_2p_all_r1.indd 8 4/25/16 12:35 PM
9
b
Sometimes I can’t breathe in this goddamn place; my
chest feels like sand. I don’t understand what’s happening. I
was too cold and too long outside. I can’t understand the clean
sheets, the sweet- smelling bedspread, the food that sits before
me in the cafeteria, magical and warm. I start to panic, shake,
choke, and Louisa, she comes up very close to me in our room,
where I’m wedged into the corner. Her breath on my face is
tea- minty. She cups my cheek and even that makes me flinch.
She says, “Little one, you’re with your people.”
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10
b
The room is too quiet, so I walk the halls at night. My
lungs hurt. I move slowly.
Everything is too quiet. I trace a finger along the walls. I
do this for hours. I know they’re thinking about putting me on
sleep meds after my wounds heal and I can be taken off anti-
biotics, but I don’t want them to. I need to be awake and aware.
He could be anywhere. He could be here.
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11
b
Louisa is like the queen. She’s been here, this time,
forever. She tells me, “I was the very first fucking girl here,
back when they opened, for God’s sake.” She’s always writing
in a black- and- white composition book; she never comes to
Group. Most of the girls wear yoga pants and T- shirts, sloppy
things, but Louisa dresses up every day: black tights and shiny
flats, glamorous thrift- store dresses from the forties, her hair
always done up in some dramatic way or another. She has suit-
cases stuffed with scarves, filmy nightgowns, creamy makeup,
blood- red tubes of lipstick. Louisa is like a visitor who has no
plans to leave.
She tells me she sings in a band. “But my nervousness,” she
says softly. “My problem, it gets in the way.”
Louisa has burns in concentric circles on her belly. She has
rootlike threads on the insides of her arms. Her legs are burned
and carved in careful, clean patterns. Tattoos cover her back.
Louisa is running out of room.
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12
b
Casper starts every Group the same way. The accor-
dion exercise, the breathing, stretching your neck, reaching to
your toes. Casper is tiny and soft. She wears clogs with elf-
ish, muted heels. All the other doctors here have clangy, sharp
shoes that make a lot of noise, even on carpet. She is pale. Her
eyes are enormous, round, and very blue. There are no jagged
edges to Casper.
She looks around at us, her face settling into a gentle smile.
She says, “Your job here is you. We are all here to get better,
aren’t we?”
Which means: we are all presently shit.
But we knew that already.
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13
b
Her name isn’t really Casper. They call her that
because of those big blue eyes, and the fact that she’s so quiet.
Like a ghost, she appears at our bedsides some mornings to
take Chart, her warm fingers sliding just an inch or so down
the hem of my bandages to reach my pulse. Her chin doubles
adorably as she looks down at me in bed. Like a ghost, she ap-
pears suddenly behind me in the hallway, smiling as I turn in
surprise: How are you?
She has an enormous tank in her office with a fat, slow
turtle that paddles and paddles, paddles and paddles, barely
making any headway. I watch that poor fucker all the time, I
could watch him for hours and days, I find him so incredibly
patient at a task that ultimately means nothing, because it’s not
like he’s getting out of the fucking tank anytime soon, right?
And Casper just watches me watch him.
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14
b
Casper smells nice. She’s always clean, her clothes
rustle softly. She never raises her voice. She rubs Sasha’s back
when she sobs so hard she chokes. She positions her arms
around Linda/Katie/Cuddles like a goalie or something when
one of the bad people breaks free. I’ve seen her in Blue’s room,
even, on the days Blue gets an enormous box of books from her
mother, pawing through the paperbacks and smiling at Blue.
I’ve seen Blue melt a little, just a little, at this smile.
Casper should be someone’s mother. She should be my
mother.
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15
b
We’re never in darkness. Every room has lights in the
walls that ping on at four p.m. and ping off at six a.m. They’re
small, but bright. Louisa doesn’t like light. Scratchy curtains
cover the windows and she makes sure to pull them shut,
tightly, every night before bed, to block out the squares of yel-
low from the office building next door. Then she drapes the
bedsheet over her head for good measure.
Tonight, as soon as she’s asleep, I kick the sheets off and
pull the curtains apart. Maybe I’m looking for the salt stars. I
don’t know.
I pee in the metal toilet, watching the silent lump of Louisa
beneath her pile of covers. In the weird mirror, my hair looks
like snakes. I squeeze the mats and dreads in my fingers. My
hair still smells like dirt and concrete, attic and dust, and makes
me feel sick.
How long have I been here? I am waking from something.
From somewhere. A dark place.
The bulbs in the hallway ceiling are like bright, long rivers.
I peek into the rooms as I walk. Only Blue is awake, holding
her paperback all the way up to the ping- light to see.
No doors, no lamps, no glass, no razors, only soft, spoonable
food, and barely warm coffee. There’s no way to hurt yourself
here.
I feel jangly and loose inside, waiting at the nurses’ station,
drumming my fingers on the countertop. I ding the little bell.
It sounds horrible and loud in the quiet hall.
Barbero rounds the corner, his mouth full of something
Glas_9781101934715_2p_all_r1.indd 15 4/25/16 12:35 PM
16
crunchy. He frowns when he sees me. Barbero is a thick-
necked former wrestler from Menominee. He still has a whiff
of ointment and adhesive. He only likes pretty girls. I can tell,
because Jen S. is very pretty, with her long legs and freckled
nose, and he’s always smiling at her. She’s the only one he ever
smiles at.
He puts his feet up on the desk and pops some potato chips
into his mouth. “You,” he says, salty bits fluttering from his lips
to his blue scrubs. “What the fuck do you want at this time of
night?”
I take the pad of sticky notes and a pen from the counter-
top and write quickly. I hold up the sticky note. HOW LONG
HAVE I BEEN HERE?
He looks at the sticky note. He shakes his head. “Uh- uh.
Ask.”
I write, NO. TELL ME.
“No can do, Silent Sue.” Barbero crumples the chip bag and
stuffs it into the trash. “You’re gonna have to open that fucked-
up little mouth of yours and use your big- girl voice.”
Barbero thinks I’m afraid of him, but I’m not. There’s only
one person I’m afraid of, and he’s far away, on the whole other
side of the river, and he can’t get to me here.
I don’t think he can get to me, anyway.
Another sticky note. JUST TELL ME, YOU OAF. My
hands are shaking a little, though, as I hold it up.
Barbero laughs. Chips clot the spaces between his teeth.
Sparks go off behind my eyes and my inside music gets very
loud. My skin numbs as I walk away from the nurses’ station.
I’d like to breathe, like Casper says, but I can’t, that won’t work,
not for me, not once I get angry and the music starts. Now my
skin isn’t numb but positively itches as I roam, roam, look-
Glas_9781101934715_2p_all_r1.indd 16 4/25/16 12:35 PM
17
ing, looking, and when I find it and turn around, Barbero’s not
laughing anymore. He’s Oh, shit- ing and ducking.
The plastic chair bounces off the nurses’ station. The con-
tainer holding the pens with plastic flowers taped to them falls
to the floor, the pens fanning out across the endless beige car-
pet. The endless, everywhere beige carpet. I start to kick the
station, which is bad, because I have no shoes, but the pain
feels good, so I keep doing it. Barbero is up now, but I grab
the chair again and he holds out his hands, all Calm down, you
crazy fucker. But he says it really soft. Like, maybe he’s a little
afraid of me now. And I don’t know why, but this makes me
even angrier.
I’m raising the chair again when Doc Dooley shows up.
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18
b
If Casper is disappointed in me, she doesn’t show it.
She just watches me watch the turtle, and the turtle does
his thing. I’d like to be that turtle, underwater, quiet, no one
around. What a fucking peaceful life that turtle has.
Casper says, “To answer the question that you asked Bruce
last night: you have been at Creeley Center for six days. You
were treated in the hospital and kept for observation for seven
days before they transferred you here. Did you know you had
walking pneumonia? Well, you still have it, but the antibiotics
should help.”
She picks up something chunky from her desk and slides it
to me. It’s one of those desk calendars. I’m not sure what I’m
looking for, but then I see it, at the top of the page.
April. It’s the middle of April.
Casper says, “You just missed Easter at Creeley. You were
a little out of it. You didn’t miss much. We can’t really have
a giant bunny hopping around a psych ward, can we?” She
smiles. “Sorry. That’s a little therapist humor. We did have an
egg hunt, though. Thanksgiving is a lot more fun around here:
dry turkey, lumpy gravy. Good times.”
I know she’s trying to cheer me up, get me to talk. I slide
my face to her but as soon as I meet her eyes, I feel the fucking
sting of tears and so I look back at the stupid turtle. I feel like
I’m waking up and going back into my darkness, all at once.
Casper leans forward. “Do you remember being in Regions
Hospital at all?”
I remember the security guard and the forest of hair inside
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19
his nose. I remember lights above me, bright as suns, the sound
of beeping that never seemed to stop. I remember wanting to
kick out when hands were on me, when they were cutting away
my clothes and boots. I remember how heavy my lungs felt, as
though they were filled with mud.
I remember being so scared that Fucking Frank was going
to appear in the doorway and take me away, back to Seed
House, to the room where the girls cried.
I remember crying. I remember the splatter of my vomit on
a nurse’s shoes, and the way her face never changed, not once,
like it happened to her all the time, and I wished my eyes to
tell her sorry, because I had no words, and how her face didn’t
change then, either.
Then nothing. Nothing. Until Louisa.
Casper says, “It’s all right if you can’t remember. Our sub-
conscious is spectacularly agile. Sometimes it knows when to
take us away, as a kind of protection. I hope that makes sense.”
I wish I knew how to tell her that my subconscious is bro-
ken, because it never took me away when Fucking Frank was
threatening me, or when that man tried to hurt me in the
under pass.
My broken big toe throbs beneath its splint and the weird
foot- bootie Doc Dooley put me in. Now, when I walk, I really
am a crazy freak, with my nesty hair and my clubby arms and
trussed- up legs and limp.
What’s going to happen to me?
Casper says, “I think you need a project.”
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20
b
It isn’t true that I want to be like the turtle and be
alone. What’s true is that I want Ellis back, but she can never
come back, ever, ever. Not the way she was, anyway. And it’s
true that I miss Mikey and DannyBoy, and I even miss Evan
and Dump, and sometimes I miss my mother, even though
missing her feels more like anger than sadness, like I feel when
I think about Ellis, and even that, really, isn’t true, because
while I say sadness what I really mean is black hole inside me
filled with nails and rocks and broken glass and the words I don’t
have anymore.
Ellis, Ellis.
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21
b
And while it’s true that my clothes are from the lost
and found, it isn’t entirely true that I have nothing, because I
do have something, they just keep it from me. I saw it once,
when Doc Dooley told me to stop watching the movie dur-
ing Entertainment and come to the nurses’ station. When I
got there, he pulled a backpack, my backpack, from beneath
the desk. Doc Dooley is super tall, and handsome, the kind
of handsome where you know he knows how handsome he
is, and that his life is that much easier for it, and so he tends
to be kind of easygoing with the rest of us, the unhandsome.
So when he said, “Two boys dropped this off. Does this look
familiar to you?” I was momentarily blinded by the whiteness
of his teeth, and fascinated by the velvety quality of his stubble.
I grabbed my pack and sank to my knees, unzipping it,
shoving my hands inside. It was there. I cradled it, sighing in
relief, because Doc Dooley said, “Don’t get excited. We emp-
tied it.”
I took out my tender kit, the army medical kit that I’d found
when I was fourteen and trolling the St. Vincent de Paul thrift
store on West Seventh with Ellis. The metal box was dented,
the large red cross on the front was scratched and losing its
paint.
My tender kit used to hold everything: my ointment, my
gauze, my pieces of broken mason jar in a blue velvet pouch,
my cigarettes, my matches and lighter, buttons, bracelets,
money, my photos wrapped in linen.
The box made no sound when I shook it. I dug deeper in
Glas_9781101934715_2p_all_r1.indd 21 4/25/16 12:35 PM
22
the green backpack, but it, too, was dark and empty. No extra
socks and underwear, no rolls of toilet paper, no film canister
filled with panhandled cash, no pills in a baggie, no rolled- up-
tight wool blanket. My sketchpad was missing. My bag of pens
and charcoals was gone. My Land Camera, gone. I looked up
at Doc Dooley.
“We had to take everything out, for your safety.” He offered
his hand to me, and even his hand was handsome, with slender
fingers and buffed nails. I ignored it, standing up by myself,
clutching my tender kit and the backpack tightly. “You have to
give the bag and the box back. We’ll keep them for you until
you’re discharged.”
He reached out and tugged the backpack away, slipped my
tender kit from my hand. He put them behind the desk. “But
you can have these.”
Doc Dooley pressed the square of linen into my hands. In-
side, protected by the soft fabric, are photographs of us: me
and Ellis, Mikey and DannyBoy, perfect and together, before
everything blew to hell.
As I walked away, pressing the photographs to my chest,
Doc Dooley called out, “Those boys, they said they were sorry.”
I kept walking, but inside, I felt myself pause, just for a
second.
Glas_9781101934715_2p_all_r1.indd 22 4/25/16 12:35 PM
23
b
My photographs are what I’m doing when Jen S. comes
to find me the night after the toe incident: thumbing through
them, greedy like I always am when I let myself think of Ellis,
poring over the black- and- white images of the four of us in
the graveyard, posing stupid like rock stars, cigarettes in the
corners of our mouths, DannyBoy’s harelip almost invisible,
Ellis’s acne hardly noticeable. DannyBoy always said people
looked better in black- and- white and he was right. The photos
are small and square; the Land Camera was old, something
from the sixties, the first kind of Polaroid. My grandmother
gave it to me. It had bellows and made me feel cool. We found
some film at the camera store by Macalester College. It was a
cartridge, and you slipped it into the camera, took the picture,
ripped the film strip from the side, and set the little round
timer. When it buzzed, you peeled back the film and there we
were, old- timey and neat- looking in black- and- white, Ellis so
beautiful with her black hair. And there was me, dumb little
me, arms folded across my chest in my holey sweater and my
hair all ratty, dyed red and blue in the real, color world, but
muddy- looking in black- and- white. Who could look anything
but gross next to Ellis?
“Cool.” Jen S. reaches down, but I wrap the photos back up
in the linen and slide them under my pillow.
“Dude,” she sighs. “Okay, whatever. Come on, then, Bar-
bero’s waiting in Rec. We’ve got a surprise for you.”
In Rec, the smell of popcorn clings to the room from the
movie we watched earlier; the empty bowl rests on a circular
Glas_9781101934715_2p_all_r1.indd 23 4/25/16 12:35 PM
24
table. Jen licks her finger and swipes the bowl, sucking off salt
and bits of congealed butter. She makes oinking sounds. Bar-
bero’s floppy lips curl. “Schumacher,” he says. “You kill me.”
She shrugs, flicking her wet finger against the hem of her
baggy green T- shirt.
She digs in one of the several “everything” bins, looking for
her favorite deck of cards. The colorful bins are stacked on top
of each other against the ivory walls of Rec. They hold playing
cards, frayed boxes of crayons, markers, games.
A bank of three computers is tucked against one wall. Bar-
bero fires one up and shoos his fingers at me while he enters
the password.
“Here’s the deal, crazy.” Barbero flings a booklet at me.
I have to bend to pick it up. He starts typing. ALTERNA-
LEARN. THE RIGHT PLACE FOR YOU pops up on the
page. “The good doctor thinks you need something to do to
curb your anger issues, of which there are apparently many, and
also your weird habit of not sleeping. So, looks like it’s back to
school for you, dumbass.”
I look over at Jen S., who grins wildly while shuffling the
cards. “I get to be your teacher,” she giggles.
Barbero snaps his fingers in my face. “FO- CUS. I’m over
here! Here.”
I glare at him.
Barbero ticks off his fingers. “Here’s the deal: don’t look at
anything but the school site. Don’t look at your Facebook, your
Twitter, your email, anything at all but the school pages. Your
friend Schumacher here has volunteered to be your teacher
and she’ll check your quizzes and all that shit when you finish
a lesson.”
He looks at me. I stare back. “You don’t wanna do it,” he
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25
says, “the good doctor says you have to start taking meds at
night to sleep and I have a feeling you don’t wanna do that.
She’d rather have you in here than creeping down the halls like
you do. Because that’s fucking weird.”
I don’t want drugs, especially at night, when I’m most
scared and need to be alert. Doctors filled me up from the time
I was eight until I was thirteen. Ritalin didn’t work. I bounced
off walls and stabbed a pencil in the cloudlike flab of Alison
Jablonsky’s belly. Adderall made me shit my pants in eighth
grade; my mother kept me home the rest of the year. She left
lunch for me under plastic wrap in the refrigerator: spongy
meat loaf sandwiches, smelly egg salad on soggy toast. Zoloft
was like swallowing very heavy air and not being able to exhale
for days. Most of the girls here are doped to the gills, accepting
their pill cups with pissy resignation.
I sit in the chair and type my name in the YOUR NAME
HERE box.
“Good choice, freak.”
“Jesus, Bruce,” Jen says, exasperated. “Did you skip that day
in nursing school when they explained bedside manner?”
“I got bedside manner, baby. Let me know when you wanna
try it.” He flops on the creaky brown Rec couch and pulls his
iPod from his pocket.
One whole wall of Rec is a long window. The curtains have
been opened. It’s dark outside, after ten o’clock. Our wing is
four stories up; I can hear the whoosh of cars in the rain down
on Riverside Avenue. If I do school, it will make Casper happy
with me. The last time I was in school, I was kicked out the
middle of junior year. That feels like a lifetime ago.
I peer at the screen and try to read a paragraph, but all I can
see are the words fucker and pussy bitch scrawled on my locker
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26
door. I can taste the tang of toilet water in my mouth, feel my-
self struggling to get free, hands on my neck and laughter. My
fingers tingle and my chest feels tight. After I got kicked out
of school, everything went haywire. Even more than before.
I look around Rec. Like a fussy little mouse, thoughts of
who’s paying for this nibble at my brain, but I push them away.
My mother cooked meat loaf with onions and ketchup and
hills of mash on the side, in a diner for years, before even that
went away. We aren’t people with money; we’re people who
dig for change at the bottoms of purses and backpacks and eat
plain noodles with butter four nights a week. Thinking about
how I’m able to stay here makes me anxious and afraid.
I think, I’m inside and warm and I can do this if it means I get
to stay. That’s what matters right now. Following the rules so I
can stay inside.
Jen’s fingers shuffle and flutter the cards. It sounds like birds
rushing to empty a tree.
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27
b
Casper asks, “How do you feel?”
Every day, she asks me this. One day a week, someone else
asks me— Doc Dooley, maybe, if he’s pulling a day shift, or
the raspy- voiced, stiff- haired doctor with too- thick mascara.
I think her name is Helen. I don’t like her; she makes me feel
cold inside. One day a week, on Sundays, no one asks us how
we’re feeling and that makes some of us feel lost. Jen S. will say,
mockingly, “I am having too many feelings! I need someone to
hear my feelings!”
Casper waits. I can feel her waiting. I make a decision.
I write down what it feels like and push the paper across
Casper’s desk. My body is on fire all the time, burning me away
day and night. I have to cut the black heat out. When I clean myself,
wash and mend, I feel better. Cooler inside and calm. Like moss
feels, when you get far back in the woods.
What I don’t write is: I’m so lonely in the world I want to
peel all of my flesh off and walk, just bone and gristle, straight
into the river, to be swallowed, just like my father.
Before he got sicker, my father used to take me on long
drives to the north. We would park the car and walk the trails
deep into the fragrant firs and lush spruces, so far that some-
times it seemed like night because there were so many trees,
you couldn’t see the sky. I was small then and I stumbled a lot
on stones, landing on mounds of moss. My fingers on the cold,
comforting moss always stayed inside me. My father could
walk for hours. He said, “I just want it to be quiet.” And we
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28
walked and walked, looking for that quiet place. The forest is
not as quiet as everyone thinks.
After he died, my mother was like a crab: she tucked every-
thing inside and left only her shell.
Casper finishes reading and folds the paper neatly, sliding it
into a binder on her desk. “Cool moss.” She smiles. “That isn’t
a bad way to feel. If only we could get you there without hurt-
ing yourself. How can we do that?”
Casper always has blank sheets of paper on her desk for me.
I write, then push it to her. She frowns. She pulls a folder from
her drawer and runs her fingers down a page.
“No, I don’t see a sketchbook on the list of items from your
backpack.” She looks at me.
I make a little sound. My sketchbook had everything, my
own little world. Drawings of Ellis, of Mikey, the little comics
I would make about the street, about me and Evan and Dump.
I can feel my fingers tingling. I just need to draw. I need to
bury myself. I make another little sound.
Casper closes the folder. “Let me talk to Miss Joni. Let’s see
what she can do.”
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29
b
My father was cigarettes and red- and- white cans of
beer. He was dirty white T- shirts and a brown rocking chair and
blue eyes and scratchy cheek stubble and “Oh, Misty,” when my
mother would frown at him. He was days of not getting out
of that chair, of me on the floor by his feet, filling paper with
suns, houses, cats’ faces, in crayon and pencil and pen. He was
days of not changing those T- shirts, of sometimes silence and
sometimes too much laughter, a strange laughter that seemed
to crack him from the inside until there wasn’t laughter, but
crying, and tears that bled along my face as I climbed up and
rocked with him, back and forth, back and forth, heartbeat
heartbeat heartbeat as the light changed outside, as the world
grew darker around us.
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30
b
Louisa says, “You’re so quiet. I’m so glad they put some-
body quiet with me. You’ve no idea how tedious it is, listening
to somebody talk out loud all the time.”
She’d been silent for so long, I thought she was sleeping.
Louisa says, “I mean, I’m talking to you, do you know that?
In my head, I mean. I’m telling you all sorts of things in my
head, because you seem like you’re a good listener. But I don’t
want to take up your thinking space. If that makes sense.”
She makes a sleepy sound. Mmmmm. Then, “I’m going to
tell you my whole story. You’re a good egg, a keeper.”
A good egg, a keeper, a good egg, a keeper— a cutter’s nurs-
ery song.
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31
b
In Group, Casper doesn’t like us to say
cut
or
cutting
or burn or stab. She says it doesn’t matter what you do or how
you do it: it’s all the same. You could drink, slice, do meth,
snort coke, burn, cut, stab, slash, rip out your eyelashes, or fuck
till you bleed and it’s all the same thing: self- harm. She says:
whether someone has hurt you or made you feel bad or un-
worthy or unclean, rather than taking the rational step of real-
izing that person is an asshole or a psycho and should be shot or
strung up and you should stay the fuck away from them, instead
we internalize our abuse and begin to blame and punish our-
selves and weirdly, once you start cutting or burning or fucking
because you feel so shitty and unworthy, your body starts to
release this neat- feeling shit called endorphins and you feel so
fucking high the world is like cotton candy at the best and most
colorful state fair in the world, only bloody and stuffed with in-
fection. But the fucked- up part is once you start self- harming,
you can never not be a creepy freak, because your whole body is
now a scarred and charred battlefield and nobody likes that on a
girl, nobody will love that, and so all of us, every one, is screwed,
inside and out. Wash, rinse, fucking repeat.
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32
b
I’m trying to follow the rules. I’m trying to go where
I’m supposed to go when I’m supposed to go there and sit like
a good girl even though I don’t say anything because my throat
is filled with nails. I’m trying to follow the rules because to not
follow the rules means to risk OUTSIDE.
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You need to read this book because. . .
“A haunting, beautiful, and necessary book
that will stay with you long after you’ve read the last page.”
—NICOLA YOON, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Everything, Everything
“Equal parts keen-eyed empathy, stark candor, and terrible
beauty. is book is why we read stories: to experience what it’s like
to survive the unsurvivable; to nd light in the darkest night.”
—JEFF ZENTNER, author of e Serpent King
“Raw, visceral, and starkly beautiful, with writing that is at times
transcendent in its brilliance. . . . An unforgettable story of trauma and resilience.”
—KERRY KLETTER, author of e First Time She Drowned
“A breathtakingly written book about pain and
hard-won healing . . . I want every girl to read Girl in Pieces. ”
—KARA THOMAS, author ofe Darkest Corners
“A
Girl, Interrupted
for a new generation. . . .e story of the
mad girl is ultimately a story about being a girl in a mad world,
how it breaks us into pieces and how we glue ourselves back together.”
—MELISSA FEBOS, author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me
“Dark, frank, and tender, Girl in Pieces keeps the reader
electried for its entire journey. You’re so uncertain if Charlie will
heal, so fully immersed in hoping she does.”
—MICHELLE WILDGEN, author of Bread and Butter and You’re Not You
“Girl in Pieces has the breath of life; every character in it is
fully alive. Charlie Davis’s complexities are drawn
with great understanding and subtlety.”
—CHARLES BAXTER, author of National Book Award naliste Feast of Love
“Charlie Davis has been damaged and abused after several years of living on
the streets, but she is ercely resilient. ough it will appeal to readers of Ellen
Foster, Speak, and Girl, Interrupted, Girl in Pieces is an entirely original
work, compulsively readable and deeply human.”
—JULIE SCHUMACHER, author theNew York Times bestseller Dear Committee Members
